Antoine Levi gallery is pleased to present GUSTS, DRAUGHTS by Norwegian artist Olve Sande.
This new series of works results from Sande's ongoing research on building materials and, here specifically, on the wind barrier, a membrane habitually used in construction yards that is hastily cut out to be replaced by a window pane.
The gesture of the cut-outs is precisely at the origin of a definition of pictorial action's new areas where, indeed, the pigment applied at the back of the cut-out patches emerges as a shadow; the wind barrier acts in this way as a sort of veil, causing the solid images to become distorted as if looking through a fogged window.

The works in Saigon Immolation evoke, compare, and reenact historical events as a way of positioning the identities of artist and viewer.

William Kaminski’s and Becca Lieb’s videos appropriate footage in which emotions are indirectly expressed. Lieb and Kaminski triangulate their own identities through their vicarious experiences of the identities figured in their works. Kaminski’s Interview ‘94, 2015, is an animation of a video with former Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciante in which he obliquely defends his long-term heroin use. The animation composites the appropriated video with still photographs in which the artist recreates, frame by frame, Frusciante’s every pose. Lieb’s video, Panopticon of Pleasure, 2015, superimposes Bas Jan Ader’s 1971 video, I’m too sad to tell you, with Meg Ryan’s performance of a fake orgasm in the 1989 rom-com, When Harry Met Sally.

David Muenzer’s Sconces, 2013-ongoing, are illuminated sculptures resembling folded paper. The watermark on each Sconce incorporates motifs from the only-just-past: an avatar employed by Edward Snowden, or the 2015 common application essay questions, used for admissions to American universities. Sowon Kwon and Jeffrey Stuker evoke events with more distance. Kwon’s series of drawings, dongghab, 2003-ongoing, takes its title from the Korean concept of a social relation determined by the year of one’s birth. Each drawing’s title refers to a place, while each drawing’s text specifies an event that took place in 1963. Stuker’s My Metal Gullet, 2016, is an animation that depicts the LIP R148, the first European electronic watch, while describing the 1973 worker’s revolt in the factory where the watch was made.

Stuker’s description of his own artistic practice speaks to the exhibition as a whole: to connect—impossibly, enticingly—histories that in reality are always partial.

Artist Bios:

William Kaminski (b. 1982, Pennsylvania, USA) lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions include Kurt Cobain Visitation Nightmare, Redling Fine Art; Esper, Phil Gallery; and Low Pressure (Kurt & Billy) at Ms Barbers in Los Angeles. In 2015 he opened a live haunted house, Kurt Cobain Haunted Heck. From 2009 to 2013 he co-directed the artist space Control Room in Downtown Los Angeles. He received his BFA from Art Center College of Art and Design in 2009 and his MFA from UCLA in 2012.

Sowon Kwon (b. 1963 Seoul, Korea) works in a range of media including sculptural and video installations, digital animation, drawing, printmaking, and artist books. Kwon holds a BA from UC Berkeley, an MFA from Pratt, and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 1991. She has had solo exhibitions at The Kitchen in New York City, Matrix Gallery/Berkeley Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris (now Altria). Her work has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions including at at The New Museum, The ICA Boston, MOCA Los Angeles, The Queens Museum, The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Artist Space, The Drawing Center, Artsonje Center in Seoul, Korea, the Gwangju Biennale, the Yokohama Triennale in Japan, and San Art in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. She is a recipient of fellowships from The New York Foundation for the Arts in Sculpture, The Wexner Center for the Arts in Media Arts, and The Asian Cultural Council.

Becca Lieb (b. 1988, New York, USA) is a Los Angeles based artist and poet. Recent exhibitions include tl;dr at Artspace, Auckland, curated by Michael Ned Holte, and neverhitsend at 356 Mission Road in Los Angeles. Recent performances include Wine House at Chin’s Push and After the Rise and Fall of the Teenager (with Patrick Ballard), at MaRS in Los Angeles. She was a 2015 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant nominee, and a 2015 Rema Hort Mann Foundation YOYOYO Grant recipient. Lieb graduated with a BA from Yale University in 2010 and received her MFA in Art from California Institute of the Arts in 2014.

David Muenzer (b. 1987, Pennsylvania, USA) lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent exhibitions include Essai at Lord Ludd Philadelphia and Scalar-Daemon at Reserve Ames in Los Angeles. Group exhibitions include neverhitsend at 356 Mission Road and Ark: A Festival for Animals at the Fortezza Franzenfeste in Bolzano, Italy. In 2011, he organized 14 & 15, an experimental exhibition on two floors of the Lipstick Building in New York City. He received his BA from Yale University in 2009 and his MFA from the University of Southern California in 2014.

Jeffrey Stuker (b. 1979, Colorado, USA) is an artist and writer about art under various insignia, both fictional and actual. He is the fashion editor at Art Handler and the director of the SEELD Library, Los Angeles branch. Recent exhibitions include This Lantern Lacks a Candle at Full Haus, Los Angeles; To Capture What The Bird Has Already at Sushi Gallery, New York; and What Lies Hidden Behind the Electronic Lip? at Hunter/Whitfield, London. He received a BFA from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 2002, and an MFA from Yale School of Art in 2005.

Balice Hertling is pleased to announce Louisa, an exhibition of works by Buck Ellison. The exhibition will run from November 5th to January 7th with an opening reception on November 5th from 7-9 P.M. The show consists of seven framed photographs, two landscapes and five portraits.

When I was fourteen, I went to Paris for the first time. I spent most of my time with my sister shopping for jeans and eating frozen yogurt, until our dad actually cried, saying he had taken us to Europe to “experience art.”

When I was fifteen, I went to Nice to study French. This was a summer of firsts: first menthol cigarette, first application of tanning oil, first Lacoste polo shirt (size 4, light yellow). I was so impressed by the girls I met there; girls from schools called Chapin, Nightingale, Spence, girls who breezed into the quad with new Longchamps after morning lessons, girls who had an answer for everything. They seemed so urbane and worldly. There was something in the casual way they related to luxury that fascinated me - and still does. It was the first time I felt that strange mix of attraction and repulsion that motivates so much of my work.

Mornings we spent conjugating the stolid verbs of ancient French, but in the afternoon we went to the market. One afternoon, we stopped at the stand of an old madame who sold tribal jewelry. My friend Louisa held up a pair of wooden earrings with parrots on them and turned to the woman. In perfect schooled French, she said:

“Vos boucles d’oreilles sont très jolie.”

-Buck Ellison

Buck Ellison (b. 1987, San Francisco), lives and works in Los Angeles. He graduated from the Städelschule, Frankfurt in 2014 and took his B.A. in German Literature from Columbia University in 2010.

It begins with her back to us and it will end—I might as well tell you now—in a full frontal confrontation. This time, entering the proscenium of the gallery is done with the same embrace of risk and responsibility as when one enters the theater of war. That is, with rules on the verge of being shed and codes of conduct inevitably eroding. But I am getting ahead of myself; that is not where we are now.

You entered the courtyard and found yourself behind an androgynous figure, facing away, standing tall. The edges of the painted image are frayed; the depiction sits unevenly within the canvas. As the paint flirts with its surrounding structural edges, you can't help but think that there are an infinite amount of points between the end of the stroke and its frame, and that if, as in Zeno's paradox, the two cannot possibly meet, there can never really be impact, nor finality, nor death. As you look at the braided figure embedded in this “infinite” plane of the painting, it comes to mind that the canvas is rough, arid and scaling. The paint sits on it, thirsty and aggravated. It exudes hotheaded urgency through its materials while depicting cool calm in its imagery—a contradiction for you to store away. The figure, unaware and uninterested in your gaze, looks out toward a blurry, watery color field. Light seems to emanate from within the painting, not from without. It is radiating something like heat. And so it begins.

ACT II (a battleground amongst many):

When you turn the corner you find yourself in a room with unsettling and uneven walls. You've heard from soldiers that war is a slow animal, usually composed of long periods of waiting with short, albeit violent, bursts of activity. This particular battlefield illustrates this well. It is deceivingly calm, restrained; it seems organized and paced. A handful of paintings sit on disproportionate walls, facing you with confidence. The landscape is gendered now: faces of women, each wearing her own distinct psyche and state of mind, are accessorized with smudged makeup, like war paint; challenging a traditional sense of beautiful with a little bit of the hysterical, the unhinged. These faces, inspired by magazines and then painted from the imagination, are engaged, engaging. Then, in sequence, in cause and effect, the larger canvases reveal a seated figure on the verge of a large landscape; a woman walking at dusk; an armored horse with its powerful knight and finally, a standing figure, literally larger than life, towering over a meddle of spears and soldiers in battle.

The stances of war, as well as their representations, have assumed innumerable forms across eras and geographies. This particular sequence of paintings quotes from, and draw affinities between a sampling of styles such as Jean-François Millet's raw representation of peasant life, the symbol-infused landscapes of traditional Chinese paintings and perhaps most obviously, Paolo Ucello's infamous Battle of San Romano.

The latter, a triptych in which each part is integral to understanding the whole, enacts a precipitated sequence of events amidst the political entanglements of a war. Each of CLAIRE TABOURET's paintings displays a fragment of this, her version of the story, rich with the quotidian experience of each of its characters.

If I were to guide you through the exhibition, we would end up in front of the namesake painting of the show. Battleground is a smooth canvas with complicated skies. A giant woman, superhero-like, struts defiantly in an outfit reminiscent of leather dominatrix gear as much as of medieval armor: Jeanne D'ARC, Michelle PFEIFFER and Grace JONES. At her stiletto heels, horse(wo)men bolt forward, kicking up dust. She stands and makes eye contact, silently embodying all of the other women who watched us walk through the galleries. She is the quintessential multifaceted psyche, a Rorschach test; reading her is reading you.

ACT III (the fourth wall and the language of war):

There is one more room I want to show you. It is a backstage of sorts, a key for the paintings, a reveal. This final room of the show exhibits 23 monotype prints hanging evenly at eye level in the safety of frames. As you walk by them you start to decode a pattern, a rhythm. Characters, shapes and colors appear repeatedly in the prints like a game of linguistic and visual associations. I refer to them as a key because they turn the characters of the exhibition, whether primary or secondary (e.g., the horse(wo)men or the landscape), into symbols of a new vocabulary. Together, they allow you to read the rest of the exhibition, which is itself a kind of syntax and subsequent anthem. In this backstage, the components are revealed, baring the device, without beginning or end, as a circular passage of time; an endless loop of conflicts and ceasefires.

An epilogue (and the stakes):

Discipline, consistency and obedience are driving principals akin to both the military and the practice of painter Agnes MARTIN. In fact, the two figures in this body of work looking away from you, reader, are portraits of MARTIN (who, it must be noted, would say that she painted with her “back to the world”). While famous for her restrained palette, systematic use of lines and sublime mastery of light, MARTIN's life was solitary; she opted to maintain a position in the margins for much of her career. Solitude, be it temporary or sustained, has often been perceived as an illness, she wrote[1], especially in women, but in her experience it was a quality that lead to rigor, dedication and artistic integrity. MARTIN painted with ardor and command, questioned traditional forms of authority and utilized the dry landscape of the desert as a vantage point to a world of her own.

Each of CLAIRE TABOURET's exhibitions builds on the last, like a thought delivered through stream of consciousness, undeterred by contradictions, playing both argument and counterargument against one another. Push and pull. Her last exhibition, Les Débutantes, consisted of crowds of adolescent characters gathering in each painting and looking forward toward a middle ground. You, viewer, were surrounded. Now mature, the faces of this body of work stand solitary, calm, claiming space with confidence using the white walls as pauses to amplify the magnetic intensity of the canvas's contents. They bleed the kind of powerful, pleasurable, provocative sensation of freedom promised in certain forms of restraint, of domination.

Lauren Mackler

[1] “We have been very strenuously conditioned against solitude. To be alone is considered to be a grievous and dangerous condition…. I suggest that people who like to be alone, who walk alone will perhaps be serious workers in the art field.”, Agnes MARTIN: Writings, edited by Dieter Schwarz (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 2005).

The film installation at the heart of the exhibition conceived by Mark Geffriaud for le plateau explores our relationship to time. The film consists of footage of two different locations, namely, the construction site of the largest telescope in the world in the
Atacama Desert, Chile, and the shores of Lake Titicaca, between Peru and Bolivia, where large building stones were abandoned more than a thousand years ago.

From the top of Mount Armazones, where the future telescope will stand, astrophysicists hope to travel back in time and witness the birth of the first galaxies. The piedras cansadas (tired stones), abandoned for unknown reasons during their
transport to the city of Tiwanaku, have given rise to much speculation by archaeologists. The various theories on the building for which they were intended rely on the past to construct various projections of a future that will forever remain
fictitious.

In Geffriaud’s film, each site becomes the mirror image of the other: the highest technology, in the near future, will project us into the most distant past, while the traces of ancient civilizations and ancestral techniques carry us back into the past, from where we consider other futures.

Between these two sites lies the land of the Aymara, the only people on earth that has an inverted concept of time, with the past lying ahead and the future behind it. Shifting from one site to the other therefore implies crossing a region where our relationship to time is upended. This reversal of time is also reflected in the arrangement of the exhibition, which is punctuated by screenings of the film, random interruptions, and the flow of the soundtrack in all the rooms. Similarly, the soundtrack itself retraces the journey between the two sites by following the development of the project in reverse.